Greece: New president all set to get sworn in

By Magda Panaotsopoulou

ATHENS

Greece’s new President, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, will be sworn in at 6 p.m. Friday.

Pavlopoulos is scheduled to lay a wreath at the Monument of the Unknown Soldier in Athens and will later head towards the Presidential Mansion to assume his responsibilities.

The new president is from the center right party New Democracy and he was elected to the post after gaining votes of 233 deputies in the 300-seat chamber.

Unlike the previous presidential elections in which government candidate Stavros Dimas needed 200 votes and had failed to do so; this election required 180 votes. Dimas failure to get elected as president had resulted in early national elections that brought the leftist anti-austerity party Syriza to power.

The ruling Syriza party and its junior coalition partner Anel-Independent Greeks had jointly proposed Pavlopoulos as their candidate; he was supported by 149 Syriza deputies and 13 deputies from Anel apart from the New Democracy deputies.

Pavlopoulos was born in 1950 and studied law at the University of Athens. He has a Ph.D. in public law and served as minister of interior, public administration and decentralization between 2004 and 2007, and minister of interior from 2007 to 2009. He will replace 85-year old Karolos Papoulias.